Thursday, September 22, 2016

So, this is approximately late August or early September in Idaho- I honestly don't remember the date. I am a fat delusional 19-year-old who's spending his waking hours reading books, lifting weights, and playing video games, going to his first ever house party where I am served alcohol.

Needless to say, I went a little nuts.

So the party goes off, the guy who brought me disappears- apparently out into the hills to get drunker and fight with whoever wanted a go, but I can only vouch for the guy ever getting drunk in my presence. I, unaware of what being drunk feels like, continue to drink well after that point. In the course of an evening, a large bottle of vodka mostly disappears, and one of my last clear memories is of taking a large swig toward the bottom of that bottle, having done my share to help put away most of it, and some whisky, everclear, gin, kalua, bourbon, and probably other things that were lost on me at the time.

After that, the next thing I remember is coming to in the hospital and apologizing profusely to the nurses and saying "you guys should really be helping people, not dealing with this shit". Shortly thereafter, the humiliation intensifies as my dad shows up with his friend, who was at the time my jujitsu instructor, and who was coaching me in physical fitness, and he's this brilliant engineer with a ton of patents and all this shit. I didn't put such words to it at the time, and it was certainly nobody's intention to do this, but part of the cringe factor of looking back on an event like this comes from being at your lowest and most humiliating low- the drunk underage idiot evicted by ambulance from a friend's house party, and my dad shows up with this guy who's a huge role model really made me painfully aware of how badly I'd fucked up.

One of those situations. But I was really surprised by how quiet the guy was. Looking back I suspect he has his own perspective on benders, but he's a boisterous, rambunctious gregarious guy, and so his quietness seemed odd that day.

Anyway, that day wound up being the 24 hours to sober up my dad gave me- I think I sarcastically counted out the 30 hours it took for an actual conversation to happen- and then my Dad sat me down in the living room, and I think my mother was also there but my memory isn't perfect, and he said "OK, so this was a cry for help". And he proceeded to explain how my Aunt, his sister, could take me on for a year if I were going to art school there, which seemed like a good option at the time, as I'd just, in a few months, been fired from a lucrative industrial photo editing job I had1, and had given up on the degree I'd pursued for a few semesters at a local college- game design2.

So, on the basis of moving further away, I chose Thailand. Which entailed being a missionary- and I, as a frustrated "athiest", said "fuck it" and decided it was better to be an atheist missionary than a 19 year old living in his parent's back yard shed. One of the amazingly frustrating and condescending shitty things that drove that was being banned from a forum where I was admittedly an ass, but partly on the basis that the people there took me to be a Christian troll, when I was genuinely- if stupidly- an atheist and on their side and just not up to speed. Because my upbringing had left with lots of really severe science denialist bullshit, which in retrospect seems more the result of the environment my parents chose for me, rather than anything to do with the views of my parents themselves.

Why a missionary? why that? Well, it was something my parents came up with as what they thought was a good opportunity, because my mom's younger brother, of course, had married a Thai nurse who was going to the Laotian church he attended near his house, her younger rabidly Christian brother wanted a white person to come help his missionary friends3 teach English.

This point bears examining for some people; Thailand is a country that is a study in contradictions, and one of those contradictions is the idea that while Thailand, that is, the Thai people culturally, as I interacted with them, would utterly reject the notion of justifying anything on the basis of race, but still point to the darkness of the skin of criminals (never mind that it is the same darkness of skin as the majority of the Thai population!)- the correlation is not so much that anybody is better by birth, but that if you are less educated, less looked after, your skin gets darker because you work in the sun more. This bias is leveraged by their culture, in their famous hospitality, as a more or less universal "benefit of a doubt" that is more easily granted to lighter foreigners than darker ones- Thai people have had no shortage of interactions between all of civilization between the pacific and Indian oceans, as Thailand, for approximately the last 700 years4.

In practice, this means that Thailand is, or at least can be, an easy place to integrate for lighter skinned people, and indeed, historically and today this has been and continues to be borne out- there are more Thai-Chinese families, where Chinese men5 have married Thai women, than there are in neighboring countries like Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Burma, and so on.

White people end up with a similar bias- maybe it has to do with the history of colonialism in southeast asia, and the resistance to it by Thailand6, Whatever the origin of it is, the generic stereotypical perception, by Thais of westerners, is that they are, or at least have the chance to be, well educated, fabulously wealthy, and that for all this we tend to be a bit oafish and clumsy with the expected social niceties, and so charity must be granted to us for our differences in order to properly accommodate a relationship that might become beneficial.

But nonetheless, we speak English natively, and being able to communicate with us is a solid cachet of points in the pecking order of Thai society, and so there is always a demand for white native English speakers. Particularly, since Thai society is rather sexually conservative, and the appetites of foreign men have led to an entirely different reputation abroad, for white native English speaking women, who won't try to fuck all the teachers and janitors at a given school that hires them quite so often as the white native English speaking men seem to.As a white guy, ostensibly a missionary- I was, again, an atheist, but not "out" to my family, I wasn't quite a white woman, but being a missionary- as long as you're relatively straightforward about that, and I was- is considered a pretty good second best, at least by the sort of people without better options, who don't know better, or who are otherwise Christian themselves already.And so my adventure began, about a month after that hangover, with a 30 hour plane ride to no bed, no air conditioning, no heated showers, no toilet paper, no sitting toilets, and no food that was available to be had in any language I spoke. I promptly enrolled in a Thai language school and began rapidly acquiring Thai, getting my bearings, and learning my way around. two weeks after I landed, I was told by that missionary family I was supposed to teach English with that "We don't want you, you speak too fast."And I was cut loose to do nothing and find my own way. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been if I'd left those idiots and done something besides study theology. 1 - - - - In the course of processing hundreds of images, I processed things faster than anybody they'd ever seen, but with an error rate that was unacceptable2 - - - - Because the coding, in Visual Basic 6 and in preparation for Visual Basic.Net, was too painful. I have never quite forgiven Microsoft for what it did to Basic as a result, and that debacle itself turned into one of my earliest sequential forrays into the discipline of programming- but that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say,

there once was a language called Basic, It was a marvelous script to write pong <sic>, When in Microsoft trucked,and the other scripts ducked,And Basic was Basically™ fucked.3 - - - - a North Korean-American family, and literal cousins to the Kim dynasty
there. Fitting, kind of. It sheds a lot of light on the country when
you learn that the leading monarch/godhead was a protestant preacher's
kid, and that there's still a continuing successions of preachers kids with their own cult outside those borders.4 - - - - Perspective, is about the age of the kingdom AND the time that
one of it's dynasties- at the time, I think it was siriyothai- first
established formal relations with Korea, a years-long nautical voyage
away. Formal relationships ended during the warring states period in Japan, because neither country could get ships around what was the Japanese pirates on one side, and the Mongolian and Chinese on the other, but this perspective has led me to ask the question: Is kimchi the Korean recreation of Som Tam, as it would be after a years-long nautical journey to a foreign land during the iron age? Is it, in fact, a faithful korean recreation of a highly esteemed but perishable foreign delicacy? It fucking isn't, but now all the white people reading this are googling both those things, all the Thai people are laughing and all the Koreans are saying "What the fuck is Som Tam?" 5 - - - - This one is a weird historical detail,
particularly, since Imperial China didn't allow women to travel, in
order to anchor its male citizens to China by family, which is why Chinese men being able to marry outside of China at all was a big deal- just think about how unpopular they were in your country at the time, and then ask how many of them were getting laid.6 - - - - Really, the use, by France and England, of Thailand as a 'buffer state' between French Indochina and the British Indian Territories, which at the time, extended East into Burma, making Thailand a natural border between the two colonial empires, and sparing Thailand an ugly share of the most disgraceful histories of those two states

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

It's a house that requires no power to run, which produces food, heats and cools itself, collects rain water for drinking water, and treats the sewage that is the byproduct of human use of that water and food. In this way, above and beyond merely being houses, Earthships are highly engineered passive human-sustaining habitats.

But houses already exist! All of these problems already have solutions, most or all of which are still accessible! Why does this matter at all?

Because Earthships can be made to do this in any environment on earth, using locally sourced materials that are normally considered garbage, such as discarded cans, bottles, and tires. Thus, they not only represent an emerging technology set that can and will outcompete our current house building technology, they are a sustainable solution, and one that is deliverable as humanitarian aid, for maximum benefit, with minimum investment.

Earthships are beautiul state-of-the-art homes which require little or no infrastructure and have little or no overhead. Made of garbage.

So, the above portion is largely rhetoric, and not actionable or useful, so here I'll describe a 'basic' earthship and list examples of this set of technology in action and explain some of the points about it.

What does an earthship look like? Any house can look like an earthship, but there is a 'classic' model that most draw elements from. Earthships are always oriented to use the sun, and so in the northern hemisphere face south, and in the southern, north. The sun-facing sides are usually built as green houses with solid stone or rammed earth floors to catch the heat from the sun in a deliberately warmed portion of the house. At the top of these green houses are vent windows that allow hot air to blow out. Behind the greenhouse portion is the house proper- these are typically long linear structures built into the side of a hill, with tire walls forming the outer boundary and smaller dividing walls inside to allocate the space into rooms. Over the top is a typically shallowly sloped roof, also typically covered in sheet metal painted a single coherent color (as a cheap, efficient, durable, light, and non-contaminating way to funnel the rain water into the collection system), which are typically on the north (in the northern hemisphere) side of the house, but which can be located just about anywhere. Typically, to keep them out of sight and mind, the water tanks that the rain water is stored in are under ground, although this is not always the case.

The Waybee earthship in Taos, NM, draws on the local Spanish and Adobe influences.

Beyond this, there aren't any real features to conclusively identify a building as an earthship or not. I say, your house can probably be turned into one, and figuring out how to make that happen is one direction of my research into these.

Tire walls being built.

Why tires? Because tires are steel-reinforced hoops of rubber casing that never decays, or for all practical purposes will never decay in the span of a human life. Because of this, they are a special challenge for our waste disposal infrastructure, or else new uses need to be found for them.

In earthships, tires are used to make large rammed-earth 'bricks' to build heavy foundations and structural components. A piece of cardboard is put in the tire to initially keep the dirt from falling out of the bottom, and then the tire is filled with dirt. When it is filled as full as can be, a sledge hammer is used to pack the dirt into the walls of the tire, and more dirt is added and then packed until the tire wall bulges on all sides equally. At this point, the pressure of the tire squeezing the dirt is sufficient to render it a single solid building block- for a normal (26 inch) tire, these will typically weigh 300 to 500 pounds.

A field of discarded tires, Kuwait.

Why is this good? First, tires are cheap, even free- and in many cases, you can even make money by charging some small amount for people to dispose of them with you, although this depends on the environment and part of the world you find yourself in. Second, because they are so wide, they do not legally require a concrete slab foundation under them, and so they can be used as a building material and meet building codes, even if some more antiquated building code systems may not have specific named provisions for these (which will change, eventually). Third, because these tires and dirt together have a lot of mass crammed very densely together, they absorb and retain heat very well- an effect which is capitalized on to passively drive convective heating and cooling to provide climate control in earthships- which, admittedly, can be done many ways with many materials besides tires, but of the available set of materials used in this sort of construction, tires represent an extremely cheap, convenient, accessible, and useful way to implement this.

One final note about tires: I can't make extravagant claims yet, but I am examining the potential of rammed earth tires as structural components for large scale civil engineering applications, and the future here seems bright. I suspect properly buttressed tire structures that use rebar to distribute load across all of the structure could see tire arches (as in, weight-bearing bridges made from tires), sky scrapers, dams and levies, and so on. There are great possibilities.

Bottles... as bricks? WTF? Well, first, that needs to be qalified- no, you don't just slap some concrete on a bottle and call it a brick. What actually happens to make these is that the neck and shoulder of two matching bottles are cut off, the resulting 'cups' of the bottom of the bottle are washed and dried, and then they are put top-to-top and the seam between them is wrapped in duct tape, creating a hollow cylindrical 'brick'.

The way these 'bottle bricks' get used is NOT as a structural component, but rather as a weight-reducing component. By adding a bottle to a cob, adobe, or cement wall, you are reducing the amount of mass required to make that wall, and reducing the weight of the wall at the same time. By using bottle bricks to do this, you can arrange them in patterns, constellations, and even make what look like mosaics of stained glass. The effect of sunlight on a brown bottle such as a beer bottle is to render them a red-orange; green glass becomes a more brilliant shade of emerald. And so, even though these are sourced from discarded materials, they result is an easy to make and aesthetically pleasing little jewel of a window that can let additional light into your house while making it lighter and more structurally sound. These are particularly popular in bathrooms, where more light but less outside visibility is usually desirable.

Plastic bottle bricks being laid in Kenya.

Then what about can walls? what about plastic bottles? These are essentially the same idea- reducing the total input of building material, reducing the total weight of the wall- and by dint of using disposable garbage to take up the space that various sorts of mud might otherwise have to occupy. Aluminium drink cans, particularly, tend to have solid uniform bottoms and tops, and these make for very good building materials that it is possible to make very interesting geometric patterns, while plastic bottles have the advantage of being very easy to work with using even simply a knife, and some of the more environmentally conscious earthshippers have taken to filling these plastic bottles with additional volumes of plastic garbage to use it up, dispose of it, and create denser filling material all in one go.

Collecting Rainwater is the next concept to understand. In an Earthship, rain water is harvested via the gutters funnelling the rain that lands on the roof into a filtration and storage system that stores a finite portion of all rain that lands on the house. If the system fills to capacity, it simply does not store any more and the rain flows off the house and over the collection onto the ground and into the water table as it normally would, without interruption.

Once rain water is collected, there are four primary uses for it. First, it is filtered and made available to the primary treated water plumbing of the house, to be available for drinking, cooking, etc. Second, the water that goes down the drain from this is fed into the green house at the south side of the house. Third, once it has fed the botanical cell there (which removes the solids and organic compounds from the water), it is used as the water to flush the toilet for the house septic system. Fourth, once it has been flushed, it is put into a septic digester to first sterilize and break the amonia compounds down into nitrates and nitrites, and then this resulting nutrient mixture is pumped into a botanical cell outside the house, where it can be used to drive landscaping or can be used for further gardening, from a contained cell that will not pollute the water table or lose moisture content too rapidly if the water table is too low, such as in especially arid regions.

Food Production, and what the heck is a "Botanical Cell"? So, in the green house, the premise is that a deliberately engineered human ecosystem can passively do the work that would otherwise require machines, investment, and human labor: they can clean shit out of water, for given values of 'clean' and 'shit'.

What does this mean? It means that, in the area that is the entrance to these houses, no matter what the climate or weather might be outside, there is usually a garden that is established around the time the house is built which continues to produce indefinitely. I have seen banana trees, fig trees, tomatoes, strawberries, all manners of herb and spice, and many other things grown in such settings. Because the green house is the portion of the house which collects and accumulates heat to drive the passive heating (and cooling) systems, keeping plants- even tropical plants- at temperatures which they will produce fruit requires no action to be taken after planting. Since it is an indoor environment, there isn't weeding to do; as long as there is somebody at the location occasionally using the sink and flushing the toilet, there will be water delivered to these botanical cells- no manual watering is ever required.

The outdoor botanical cells are essentially the same idea, but are separated because the source of the water is from the black water / septic system. It isn't that there is no capacity to clean this to the point that it couldn't be used indoors, but as a way of meeting code, preventing problems associated with clogs and backups, even though these work essentially the same way, the one inside the earth ship is usually just cleaning soap and tooth paste out of the water, rather than less savory components.

This is the tip of a very large iceberg.

To illustrate what urban food production looks like, lets take tomato plants. In an environment that supports them in doing so, they will grow indefinitely. A well established year-old tomato plant, producing beef steak tomatoes, will produce them in bunches of what look, at first glance, exactly like cherry tomato bunches, with each tomato being 10 times the size of a cherry tomato. Here's one that's 50 weeks old (two weeks short of a year), 24 feet long, still producing fruit, and still growing, pointed out about halfway through this video. Check it out.

Further Data:

Garbage Warrior, a documentary that was made to comprehensively explain this topic by the actual Earthship people. On Yootoob here.

A house tour, to give some context to what a conventional function-first earthship would look something like

Here is an excellent look at some of the features, design principles, and operating constraints of the building methods described here.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Now, I will freely admit that this is an unusual topic to waste people's time with- but so many of the topics here have been, and you're here anyway. And since it is an eye-catching detail in perhaps the most bizarre and illustrative trip I took during my time in Thailand, I want to detail it here, as much for myself as for you, because it is a memory worth sharing.

Now, this story needs a bit of setup. You should know how, by this time, I was living in Thailand doing missionary work. Now, in the pursuit of this, I wanted a visa that I could live in the country of Thailand with, and by far the easiest and most useful sort of Visa to get for my purposes was an educational visa. It let you stay in the country for a year, reporting to the Thai national immigration authorities every 90 days about your whereabouts in the country, etc.

So, to get this visa, I - first- went to Burma, extending the length of time I had on my tourist visa. 2 days, by bus, and an overnight stay. After that I crashed for a day, and then got on a bus to go to bangkok- mistakenly thinking I had to request a visa from the central office in Thailand where these are actually recorded.

Back to the drawing board! I finally, after a bit of research, managed to figure out what was intuitively obvious to everyone but me- Thai visas come from Thai embassies in other countries- and bitterly accepted that I'd have to leave Thailand.

Once I communicated this to my uncle Mee (1), and Goi (2) his then-fiance, they managed to attach me to a group tour of Thailand that took me down south- again- this time on the most obnoxious bus ride I've ever been on ever. I want to make this clear from the outset- the people were lovely, and very accomodating, and generous, and kind, and I have the utmost respect for them- but traditional Thai music, when it encountered militaristic polka in the early 20th century, gave birth to Thai country music- music that is both infinitely obnoxious and infinitely boring. If migraines had a beat, it would be that "bok bok bok" of a wooden block being hit for the exact same rhythm in every song- except that, more often than not, the guy doing it was off the beat just enough to make every "bok" land on the ears at the least welcome moment. Coupled with that that a packed bus left little room, a long trip left no time to stretch, and the air conditioning being blasted at full strength kept everyone freezing.

We get down south, and it's... tourist town- but it's a Thai tourist town. At the time, remember, I was still coming to grips with the Thai language and really learning the vocabulary- to this day I don't know the name of that place (3). We spent the night in a very basic accommodation- literally a single room for about 20 people, all sleeping on what we'd call gym mats in the US, sharing a single bathroom. It was a cold room, again, but it warmed up when it filled up. I still remember wandering out at perhaps 2 AM to see a handful of drunken tour operators each individually riding tandem bicycles that could have fit perhaps 10 people each in circles in front of this room.

After that4 brief stint, Goi's family and I proceeded onwards to a mountain-top palace from the 1800s, with a healthy infestation of monkeys. A recently installed cable car took our group up to the top, and- at the behest of my uncle's father-in-law to be, I snapped a few technically-illegal photos of him and his friend near a beat-up looking chair which I suspect was a famous king's.

The next stop on my trip was Bangkok- a brief lunch with the bus stewardess's son 5, where I got to see a bizarre swath of Thailand- a trip through at least two temples, and at least one palace, along riverboat ferries, and through several restaurants. My guides managed to greatly aide my pidgin Thai, and though it may sound like nothing, nobody wants to be the fuckup who can't tell the difference between "River" ("menam") and "oil" ("naman"), and after a brief chuckle where I asked for clarification, I learned that there's no mistake so silly that you can't move on from it 6.
From there, my trip took me by train to Udon Thani or thereabouts, on a Thai "Sleeper" train- there are seats that convert into lower bunks, and upper bunks that fold down. On a Thai train, this means that they will also attach a restaurant car, normally featuring a bar- standard fare everywhere- but it also means that enterprising citizens will roll cases of cold beer down the train to hock them for slightly better prices than the bar, as well as snacks, pre-boxed Thai food, and basically anything else that you might want. In some cases it's actually harder to avoid a 3-course meal and a hangover on a train than it is to find one. I managed to have a lovely conversation with a British man and a few beers, and then I borrowed a book of his for the night- we were both fans of military history and special ops fiction, he mentioned having even met Roy Boehm, who created the well known SEAL teams, and then the conversation foreshadowed my story a little bit when I mentioned losing a bunch of weight as a result of moving to Thailand, and he mentioned having gained a lot because he'd been here so long.

I got off that train at about 7 in the morning in Nong Khai, an hour's drive from my cousin's house in Udon. I remember it as a cold gray misty morning, but it must have been about 70 degrees farenheit. My cousin, so this is clear, was a Thai man studying, at that time, to enter the Thai Royal Police- he has long since graduated with honors, but at the time, he was living in what I now call the "dead gecko house."

Most people have heard of what's called a "Tokay Gecko". It's a large purplish white gecko that's a popular pet because they're tough critters that even incompetent pet enthusiast will have a hard time accidentally killing. They're so tough, in fact, that there are now huge wild populations of Tokay Geckos living in places like Florida- the descendants of escaped pets. Now, in the US, a big tokay is perhaps 12-15 inches long, or approximately 30-40 centimeters. The largest I've seen in the wild was at least two feet (60 centimeters), and I've caught ones that were approximately 18 inches (~45 cm) in rural areas of Thailand.

In this house, in one room, there were- as best I can remember- about 3 dead Tokay geckos, and perhaps four or five living ones. I won't claim to remember everything perfectly, but I remember distinctly looking up at the ceiling of this dark room, perhaps 10-15 feet above my head, and seeing indistinct gray shadows that I recognized, and getting out my flashlight- an expensive Gerber LED light I was extremely proud of at the time, and have long since lost- and seeing, first the ones on the wall, and then looking around and seeing a skeleton tail hanging off the side of a "spirit house" 7, with the desiccated remains of the dead geckos I mentioned looking for all the world like enormous giant dried-up bugs on a windowsill.

Now, I was nervous about my trip into Laos- my country, after all, had engaged in an extensive illegal bombing campaign there during its war with Vietnam, and I expected no warm reception for my nationality- which is generally what Americans expect, until they've been abroad, I think- based on my own limited experience. Perhaps it's not just us, but then, few countries have bombed so many others- even if we claim it was all legal now, that's not something to be proud of. Anyway, on that basis, I elected to leave my leatherman 9 at my cousin's house, to pick up after I left Laos.10
Now Laos... well, I don't know what was going on. I do know that several months later, there was a major change of government- but , while the city wasn't actually on any sort of lockdown I could detect, literally everything shut down at sunset, and the only people I saw out when I went out one evening to look for food, thinking it would be just like Thailand, the only people I saw were armed policemen, the only lights I saw were street lights and the lights from the hotel, and during that time I saw what looked like presidential convoys of big shiny black cars, surrounded by a guard of policemen on Harley Davidson motorcycles, with big shiny black limousines in the middle.

The impression was of a city under siege. Something was happening, and I don't know what. But I did see lots of soldiers with guns- ancient underfolding AKM's, so worn that the bluing was gone and the guns were grey metal- and lots of policemen carrying ancient looking automatics- looking something like a makarov, but I can't positively ID that. I asked the staff at the hotel, and the only explanation I remember was essentially a hand wave and "politics".

Much of my memory of that trip is of the insides of bathrooms- something there, maybe the water, maybe the food, maybe something else altogether, gave me the worst diarrhea I've had ever. The food was great- I remember a large bowl of what I'd call "kuay Tiaw" in Thai, with a large plate of moo satay and an excellent peanut sauce, and the som tam- everywhere! literally every place! was among the best somtam I've ever had. probably also loaded with MSG, but still delicious. And, thanks to French colonialism, baguettes were cheap, delicious, and plentiful, and I indulged often.

Now, the trip was happening so that I could obtain an educational Visa to Thailand- and after a trip to the Thai embassy to get that left me on a wild goose chase to figure out what other endorsement I needed from my school, and why they needed an extra $250 for it, I went back several days later, they simply processed my paperwork- I didn't try to avoid the teller who had apparently been angling for a bribe, I just went up to the window with the same paperwork I'd had before and they processed me right away. Being able to actually do the paperwork meant I'd actually have to have the money in hand- and that meant a four hour ride on the city's tuk-tuks 11 to the only bank in Laos that I could actually withdraw money from, which brought me into contact with, first, the painful nature of sanctions and trade relations- because some shit just needs to work, like the economy, and in Laos, it doesn't. Or at least, at the time, it didn't. And second, it made me aware that there was more to Laos- that there were intelligent and successful people here who thrived in spite of sanctions, and without needing to kill everyone to do it. The impression I got of Laotians was that they were in the same boat, and knew it was a rough ride, and wouldn't begrudge helping each other if they could- and would understand if somebody didn't help them because they couldn't.

All of this is underscored by memories of walking through shit-and-garbage-filled alley marketplaces, where people were selling food. Basic services weren't being done, in other words, or at a slower rate than should have been, and life had to go on anyway. So everybody cleaned as best they could, and cooked what they could, and the spices used so heavily also have antimicrobial effects, and so on. This was my first exposure to widespread subsistence poverty, and the problem I have obsessed over since then is how to address survival in this environment, and in the bare subsistence environments of the Karen tribes I saw in person even before this, and of the bare subsistence of the Lisu particularly later on.

It's important to point that out, for a minute. That's why I was a missionary: That's how I wound up going to college in Thailand. When I say "My experience has not been typical", I'm generally trying to warn people that I made the bad decisions for reasons they shouldn't try to emulate, or that I got lucky in ways you should not count on. I should have died lots of times. But the common theme is recognizing this situation of the bulk of the human species, and wanting to use technology to solve those basic problems. So I learned to do stuff on the basis that the niceties of civilization could be re-implemented independently, in more elegant form, by these groups. I really hate how "holier than thou" it sounds, I'm just trying to do right by the people I knew and know, so that I'm not a total asshole.

All this spun through my head as I looked over at the only other person exiting Laos at that time, and the manly part of my brain sat bolt upright and took due note of the milf 12 at the other window.

Now, I was leaving at an unusual time- it was early in the afternoon- and I hadn't secured transportation, and just vaguely knew I had to get back to Chiang Mai so that I could continue on my journey. However, there isn't a bus from Vientienne's immigration checkpoint to Chiang Mai, as that would be a 12 hour bus ride. I exited looking for a ride, and instead of the songthaews 13 I was used to, discovered, to my surprise and delight, the milf had a car- when she offered me a ride to where she was going, several hours south.

Now, I was a Christian attempting to be a missionary at the time, and I think that's an important angle to examine: how do I get duped into temptation? And the answer was: stupid Christian rules about chastity. See, girls aren't allowed to go anywhere alone in Thai Christian culture- they're expected to go in pairs, so that one acts as a chaperone, or in case one is injured or raped <their actual explicit concern>, the other one is able to assist or call for help. This woman didn't have anything like this; therefore, in my estimation, I was simply being gallant by offering.

And yes, it sounds just as stupid to me saying it as it does to you, reading it. But that was my thought process at the time.

Yes, it's pronounced exactly like the English word "me". If you're ever in a position where you have to actually say the fucking word and someone is getting confused, the memory trick of attaching something pleasant- like naked ladies- to the information, in this case the translation "Bear", using a phonetic pattern you intuitively recognize, can greatly assist your attempts at memorizing shit- and hey presto! My hardcore christian Thai uncle, "Bear naked ladies!". He'll hate this, but I think it kind of suits him.

"Pinky"

No, it wasn't fucking Pattaya. Pattaya, is for white people- and I was literally the only one in this place. This was a little stretch of cleared beach south of Bangkok. That's literally all I know. I think it may have been Sriracha, but that's literally based on glancing at the names on google earth.

Actually, that may have been before the beach- I remember both
clearly, but am less clear on the order. They were only a bus trip
apart, in either case, and that's how I remember them.

My life is filled with examples of human kindness by people who's names I wish I could remember, so that I could thank them. This couple- the stewardess's son, and his fiance- are exhibit A.

Unless it kills you.

"Spirit Houses" are an Asian phenomena that extend throughout southeast Asia, and the premise is that you buy a small house for the ghosts in your house- your ancestors, by default- and then give them stuff to make them happy so they'll leave you alone. In Thailand particularly, you'll see big spirit houses in front of places like hospitals, typically with equally large tables in front of them for the people's offerings- things like elephant figures8 in Thailand, but also small plastic figures- spiritual slaves, including sex slaves- and I've heard of people leaving model cars and so on for the spirits too.

An auspicious gift that says, "please boogyman, don't kill my friend/family member in this hospital!"

A really nice pocket knife with pliers that was a gift from a family friend when I left the US.

I wound up getting it back several months later, as my return trip didn't take me back that way. I kinda feel like I owe my cousin beer for that.

"Tuk-tuks" are the Thai description of what are described as "Rickshaws" in south Asia, I believe. They're a 3-wheeled vehicle, normally powered by Propane in Thailand, which have handlebars like a motorcycle to turn the front wheel, and a large reclining bench seat that can comfortably accommodate two people- and uncomfortably accommodate a lot more, especially if they are drunk.

Traditionally "Mother I'd like Fucking", in reference to both the age and the subjective attractiveness

"Song Thaew" is how you say "two rows" in Thai, and is the colloquial name for a type of public transportation consisting of a pickup truck chassis that has been modified to fit two bench seats into the back with a cover and windows over the top, and usually a cargo rack on top for carrying heavy goods. In different parts of Thailand, these act as Taxis, bus lines, and even agricultural goods shipping- it's not uncommon to see fleets of the red ones at markets at 3 AM filled to the brim with vegetables being unloaded for the day's sales.